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Then she tried to find some topic of conversation.
“So what’s new and exciting with you?”
Not much. Don’t know. Ray was never rude or irritable, but he never gave her an inch. His health was okay. His cold was okay. Mrs. Cornish and Irene were always okay as well.
Mrs. Cornish was a woman whose house he lived in, somewhere in East Vancouver. He always had jobs to do around Mrs. Cornish’s house as well as around this one-that was why he had to hurry away as soon as the work was done. He also helped with the care of her daughter Irene, who was in a wheelchair. Irene had cerebral palsy. “The poor thing,” Mrs. Gorrie said, after Ray told her that Irene was okay. She never reproached him to his face for the time he spent with the afflicted girl, the outings to Stanley Park or the evening jaunts to get ice cream. (She knew about these things because she sometimes talked on the phone to Mrs. Cornish.) But to me she said, “I can’t help thinking what a sight she must be with the ice cream ru
She said that when she took Mr. Gorrie out in his wheelchair people looked at them (Mr. Gorrie had had a stroke), but it was different, because outside the house he didn’t move or make a sound and she always made sure he was presentable. Whereas Irene lolled around and went gaggledy-gaggledy-gaggledy. The poor thing couldn’t help it.
Mrs. Cornish could have something in mind, Mrs. Gorrie said. Who was going to look after that cripple girl when she was gone?
“There ought to be a law that healthy people can’t get married to someone like that, but so far there isn’t.”
When Mrs. Gorrie asked me to go up for coffee I never wanted to go. I was busy with my own life in the basement. Sometimes when she came knocking on my door I pretended not to be home. But in order to do that I had to get the lights out and the door locked the instant I heard her open the door at the top of the stairs, and then I had to stay absolutely still while she tapped her fingernails against the door and trilled my name. Also I had to be very quiet for at least an hour afterward and refrain from flushing the toilet. If I said that I couldn’t spare the time, I had things to do, she would laugh and say, “What things?”
“Letters I’m writing,” I said.
“Always writing letters,” she said. “You must be homesick.”
Her eyebrows were pink-a variation of the pinkish red of her hair. I did not think the hair could be natural, but how could she have dyed her eyebrows? Her face was thin, rouged, vivacious, her teeth large and glistening. Her appetite for friendliness, for company, took no account of resistance. The very first morning that Chess brought me to this apartment, after meeting me at the train, she had knocked at our door with a plate of cookies and this wolfish smile. I still had my travelling hat on, and Chess had been interrupted in his pulling at my girdle. The cookies were dry and hard and covered with a bright-pink icing to celebrate my bridal status. Chess spoke to her curtly. He had to get back to work within half an hour, and after he had got rid of her there was no time to go on with what he’d started. Instead, he ate the cookies one after another, complaining that they tasted like sawdust.
“Your hubby is so serious,” she would say to me. “I have to laugh, he always gives me this serious, serious look when I see him coming and going. I want to tell him to take it easy, he hasn’t got the world on his shoulders.”
Sometimes I had to follow her upstairs, torn away from my book or the paragraph I was writing. We sat at her dining-room table. There was a lace cloth on it, and an octagonal mirror reflecting a ceramic swan. We drank coffee out of china cups and ate off small matching plates (more of those cookies, or gluey raisin tarts or heavy scones) and touched tiny embroidered napkins to our lips to wipe away the crumbs. I sat facing the china cabinet in which were ranged all the good glasses, and the cream-and-sugar sets, the salt-and-peppers too dinky or ingenious for daily use, as well as bud vases, a teapot shaped like a thatched cottage, and candlesticks shaped like lilies. Once every month Mrs. Gorrie went through the china cabinet and washed everything. She told me so. She told me things that had to do with my future, the house and the future she assumed I would have, and the more she talked the more I felt an iron weight on my limbs, the more I wanted to yawn and yawn in the middle of the morning, to crawl away and hide and sleep. But out loud I admired everything. The contents of the china cabinet, the housekeeping routines of Mrs. Gorrie’s life, the matching outfits that she put on every morning. Skirts and sweaters in shades of mauve or coral, harmonizing scarves of artificial silk.
“Always get dressed first thing, just as if you’re going out to work, and do your hair and get your makeup on”-she had caught me more than once in my dressing gown-“and then you can always put an apron on if you have to do the washing or some baking. It’s good for your morale.”
And always have some baking on hand for when people might drop in. (As far as I knew, she never had any visitors but me, and you could hardly say that I had dropped in.) And never serve coffee in mugs.
It wasn’t put quite so baldly. It was “I always-” or “I always like to-” or “I think it’s nicer to-”
“Even when I lived away off in the wilds, I always liked to-” My need to yawn or scream subsided for a moment. Where had she lived in the wilds? And when?
“Oh, away up the coast,” she said. “I was a bride, too, once upon a time. I lived up there for years. Union Bay. But that wasn’t too wild. Cortes Island.”
I asked where that was, and she said, “Oh, away up there.”
“That must have been interesting,” I said.
“Oh, interesting,” she said. “If you call bears interesting. If you call cougars interesting. I’d rather have a little civilization myself.”
The dining room was separated from the living room by sliding oak doors. They were always open a little way so that Mrs. Gorrie, sitting at the end of the table, could keep an eye on Mr. Gorrie, sitting in his recliner in front of the living-room window. She spoke of him as “my husband in the wheelchair,” but in fact he was only in the wheelchair when she took him out for his walk. They didn’t have a television set-television was still almost a novelty at that time. Mr. Gorrie sat and watched the street, and Kitsilano Park across the street and Burrard Inlet beyond that. He made his own way to the bathroom, with a cane in one hand and the other hand gripping chair backs or battering against the walls. Once inside he managed by himself, though it took him a long time. And Mrs. Gorrie said that there was sometimes a bit of mopping up.
All I could usually see of Mr. Gorrie was a trouser leg stretched out on the bright-green recliner. Once or twice he had to make this drag and lurch along to the bathroom when I was there. A large man-large head, wide shoulders, heavy bones.
I didn’t look at his face. People who had been crippled by strokes or disease were bad omens to me, rude reminders. It wasn’t the sight of useless limbs or the other physical marks of their horrid luck I had to avoid-it was their human eyes.
I don’t believe he looked at me, either, though Mrs. Gorrie called out to him that here I was visiting from downstairs. He made a grunting noise that could have been the best he could do by way of a greeting, or dismissal.
There were two and a half rooms in our apartment. It was rented furnished, and in the way of such places it was half furnished, with things that would otherwise have been thrown away. I remember the floor of the living room, which was covered with leftover squares and rectangles of linoleum-all the different colors and patterns fitted together and stitched like a crazy quilt with strips of metal. And the gas stove in the kitchen, which was fed with quarters. Our bed was in an alcove off the kitchen-it fitted into the alcove so snugly that you had to climb into bed from the bottom. Chess had read that this was the way the harem girls had to enter the bed of the sultan, first adoring his feet, then crawling upward paying homage to his other parts. So we sometimes played this game.